A first look at our 2025 exhibition program

With a regenerative approach to commissioning and exhibition-making, the art and advocacy foundation TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary strives to support artistic practice that reimagines the world, driven by the belief in art and culture as agents of social and environmental transformation. In 2025, TBA21’s exhibition program will unfold at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, and at various sites around the world: in Seoul for a collaboration with Art Sonje, and in Nice on the occasion of the Nice Biennial of Arts and the 3rd UN Ocean Conference.

Exhibitions in Spain

Tarek Atoui. At-Tāriq 
A Journey into the Rural Music Traditions of North Africa and the Arab World 
Curated by Daniela Zyman
February 18–May, 18, 2025
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

With his new long-term research and exhibition project At-Tāriq, meaning "The Nightcomer" or "The Morning Star," Tarek Atoui shifts the focus toward rural musical forms of the Arab world, tracing their resonance along historical routes of pilgrimage and trade across the sub-Saharan region. Emerging from two years of exchange with musicians and artisans from Morocco’s Atlas region and well beyond, At-Tāriq consists of five listening stations, composing a space of poetic hospitality around the majlis, the traditional space of welcoming in Arab and North African homes.


Terraphilia. Beyond the Human in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections
An exhibition by TBA21 and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Curated by Daniela Zyman with Marina Otero Verzier 
July 1–September 28, 2025
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

As planetary upheavals threaten the future of biotic life, teachings from ancient, mythical, Indigenous, and speculative cosmologies and wisdom traditions are resurfacing with fresh clarity. These old and new stories about the cosmos offer guidance in reclaiming humanity’s role in renewal and repair, revealing that worlds can be made through other means. Featuring works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Carmen Thyssen, and TBA21 collections, Terraphilia embraces ecological thinking “with the planet,” inviting diverse worldviews that challenge human-centered and mono-naturalist perspectives, while fostering a vision of interspecies and non-hierarchical reawakening.


John Akomfrah. Listening All Night To The Rain
Curated by Tarini Malik
November 4, 2025–February 8, 2026 
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
For this exhibition, John Akomfrah restages his most ambitious and experimental body of work to date in a new and site-specific presentation, bringing together immersive multi-screen film and sound installations. Mining questions of memory and the memorial through the layering of archival footage with theatrically staged tableaux, Akomfrah conceives the artwork as a manifesto that encourages the act of listening as a form of activism.


TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space, Venice

otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves]
Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel
Commissions by Nadia Huggins, Tessa Mars
April 5–November 2, 2025
Ocean Space, Venice

TBA21–Academy presents an exhibition curated by the Dominican curator Yina Jiménez Suriel, a culmination of her cycle as a curatorial fellow of The Current IV: Caribbean (2023–2025). The exhibition features new commissions by the artists Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars, underscoring the power of improvisation~freestyle as an aesthetic strategy to transcend terrestrial and extractivist perspectives for our planet, expand the ideas of systems for sustaining life, and grapple with entrenched notions of power.


Echoes of the Sanctuary
Curated by Louise Carver
April 5–November 2, 2025
Ocean Space, Venice (Research Room)
For almost a decade, TBA21–Academy has been working alongside the Alligator Head Foundation, managing the East Portland Fish Sanctuary for coral and habitat restoration, working with fishing and upland farming communities through a ridge-to-reef methodology. "Echoes of the Sanctuary" makes this initiative public in Ocean Space's research room, combining perspectives from science, art, culture, and community alongside new research from TBA21–Academy related to convivial conservation and deep-sea mining.


Exhibitions around the world

Becoming Ocean. A Social Conversation about the Ocean
An exhibition by Villa Arson, TBA21, and The Tara Ocean Foundation 
May 7–August 24, 2025
Villa Arson, Nice

Villa Arson, TBA21, and The Tara Ocean Foundation present an exhibition exploring the most pressing challenges facing the Ocean with more than 20 international artists from the TBA21 Collection, the Tara Ocean Foundation's artists-in-residence program, and a new site-specific commission by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, employing critical and documentary approaches as well as more sensory, poetic, and speculative expressions. The exhibition is part of the program for the Nice Biennial of Arts and the Ocean and the United Nations Conference on the Oceans. 


Clear, Lucid, and Awake. Spanish Artists on the Positive Transformation of the World
An exhibition by TBA21 and Art Sonje Center
Curated by Chus Martínez
May 9–July 20, 2025
Art Sonje Center, Seoul

Centered on works from the TBA21 Collection, this exhibition features artists who utilize oral traditions, folklore, and fiction to present narratives that diverge from official histories. By examining relationships with time, place, and people, these artists reveal nature as a dynamic entity intertwined with humanity’s evolution, serving as an invitation to foster communal thinking. The exhibition takes place in the framework of the 75th anniversary of the institutional relations between Spain and South Korea.


See more about TBA21’s events and educational and research programs, such as Organismo, OCEAN / UNI, and The Current.